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Page 80
Surprised and impressed by his unwonted seriousness, the girl
instinctively shrank back against the balustrade.
"Mr. Sybarite--!" she murmured, wide-eyed.
He remarked her action with a gesture almost of supplication.
"Don't be alarmed," he begged; and there was in his voice the least
flavour of bitterness. "I'm not going to say anything I
shouldn't--anything you wouldn't care to hear. I'm not altogether mad,
Miss Blessington; only...
"Well!" he laughed quietly--"when my run of luck set in to-night back
there at the gambling house, I told myself it was _Kismet's_
doing--that this was my Day of Days. If I had thought, I should
instead have called it my Night of Nights--knowing it must wear out
with the dawn."
His gesture drew her heed to the east; where, down the darkling,
lamp-studded canyon of a cross-town street, stark against a sky
pulsing with the faintest foreboding of daybreak, the gaunt,
steel-girdered framework of the new Grand Central Station stood--in
its harshly angular immensity as majestic as the blackened skeleton of
a burnt-out world glimpsed against the phosphorescent pallor of the
last chill dawn....
In the great ball-room behind them, the last strains of dance music
were dying out.
"Now," said the little man with a brisker accent, "by your leave, we
get back to what we were discussing; your welfare--"
"Mr. Sybarite," the girl interrupted impetuously--"whatever happens, I
want you to know that I at least understand you; and that to me you'll
always be my standard of a gentleman brave and true--and kind."
As impulsively as she had spoken, she gave him her hands.
Holding them fugitively in both his own, he gazed intently into the
shadowed loveliness of her face.
Then with a slight shake of his head--whether of renunciation or of
disappointment, she couldn't tell--he bent so low that for a thought
she fancied he meant to touch his lips to her fingers.
But he gave them back to her as they had come to him.
"It is you who are kind, Miss Blessington," he said steadily--"very
kind indeed to me. I presume, and you permit; I violate your privacy,
and you are not angry; I am what I am--and you are kind. That is going
to be my most gracious memory....
"And now," he broke off sharply, "all the pretty people are going
home, and you must, too. May I venture one step farther? Don't permit
Bayard Shaynon--"
"I don't mean to," she told him. "Knowing what I know--it's
impossible."
"You will go to the Plaza?"
"Yes," she replied: "I've made up my mind to that."
"You have a cab waiting, of course. May I call it for you?"
"My own car," she said; "the call check is with my wraps. But," she
smiled, "I shall be glad to give it to you, to hand to the porter, if
you'll be so good."
He had longed to be asked to accompany her; and at the same time
prayed to be spared that trial. Already he had ventured too perilously
close to the brink of open avowal of his heart's desire. And that
way--well he knew it!--humiliation lay, and opaque despair. Better to
live on in the melancholy company of a hopeless heart than in the
wretchedness of one rejected and despised. And who--and what--was he,
that she should look upon him with more than the transient favour of
pity or of gratitude for a service rendered?
But, since she, wise in her day and generation, did not ask him,
suddenly he was glad. The tension of his emotion eased. He even found
grace to grin amiably.
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